Australia After Dark

"Australia After Dark" is an awful, tedious pretend-documentary that runs out of excuses to show naked flesh about twenty minutes in and just starts throwing it at you without reason. Look, here's a spear fisher- woman... who does her job naked. Look, here's a random guy tired from a hard day's work going for a massage... naked. The movie shows us not one but two scenes of naked body painting, and then shoehorns in another scene of a naked woman being covered with food, this time.

Not even the constant nudity can stop this movie from being as boring as bat urine, though there was maybe one or two scenes that were worth seeing for camp value alone, namely a "witch" who uses his powers for "good, rather than evil". His acolytes are, of course, all naked women, and after hearing about what a good witch he is, we are then treated to the sight of a screaming young girl having her clothes stripped off and being tied to a cross upside down.

The ever-present narrator is irritating and embarrassing, and in the handful of times they allow some kook to take centre stage I was glad because at least it gave us a break from that condescending gentleman describing absolutely everything as though if he shut his gob for five seconds we'd be completely lost and our heads would explode. The few people who get to speak to the camera are not at all well chosen, such as some bint who rambles about UFO sightings (boring) and a guru who supposedly heads a new age cult, even though we saw him before with the UFO people... did they run out of money to hire another actor?

The best is saved til last, with a transvestite performer showing different guises and talents. This section, which lasts barely a minute, is more interesting than the rest of the entire movie combined. S/he should have been the focus of another, much better movie.

One last thing: at one point (well, many, actually) this crockumentary takes us inside a sex show where we see a lady stripping. The boring blowhard of a narrator builds it up to make us think that what we are actually seeing is a man, and this is just one of the many bizarre things that come out after dark in Oz, and we're lucky we have the humble narrator to take us through it in explicit tones, but... actually, it was a woman after all? I guess they couldn't afford a real she-male, just like they couldn't afford a different actor to pretend to be the guru, so they just got one of the UFO guys to fill his role, assuming no one would notice. The movie is, after all, so boring that it's a challenge to stay awake through it, let alone keep track of one person on screen to the next.